Can you hear me now?

Dad? It's me, Smitty. I can't hear you very well. I'll squish it harder against my head.
Dad!
What's wrong with this thing. Dad! Are you there? Shaking stuff usually fixes it. Also tasting it.
It's true. I'm hilarious. Smitty's out. Peace!

Davy Crockett birthday party

Two birthdays down and one to go! Dash wanted a Davy Crockett-themed party. The invite:
The cake:

Why oh why did I not take pictures of the inside? It was dark chocolate cake with ooey gooey marshmallow buttercream (supposed to be like a campfire s'more, idea from Pintrest) and the milk chocolate frosting on the outside. Delicious. Totally delicious. And Bear Tracks ice cream. Keep the theme alive!

I told Joe he was in charge of the actual party and I would do food. He came through in a big way. We had a good old-fashioned mountain man rendezvous, complete with hatchet toss....
bow-and-arrow shooting...
stick-wrestling...
leg-wrestling...
and cute babies underfoot. Is that not what a real mountain man rendezvous is made of?
With each event they won pelts which they strung on a leather strap and turned in at the trading post for drinks and candy and stick-on mustaches. They also got to wrestle a barr (attack an angry-bear pinata) for candy.
It was hard to find a real angry bear at the party store.

Finally, when everyone went home, this is what they got for a thank-you.

Solving his own problems

Step 1. find a MUCH bigger container for your milky bedtime drink

Step 2. fit container with delivery nozzle of your choice.

Step 3. be pleased with your own genius.

Step 4. get super mad when there's no actual milky bedtime drink in the container, have a right little tantrum and throw all the parts down the heat vent.

Burlap wreath

My sister asked me to make a wreath for her door. Her door is not blue. But I keep telling her it should be.

This was really easy and quick. Unlike that ruffled wreath that required 4,305,975 (or thereabouts) felt circles and shriveled my hands into cramped tyrannosaur claws. It was worth it though.

I cut the burlap into strips. Then I held the center fiber tight and pulled the fabric down along it, making a loose ruffle (but without the hassle of a basting stitch!) I took these ruffled strips and wound them around the wreath, pinning them as I went. If the wreath base and the fabric had contrasted more, I think I would have wound the wreath in non-ruffled burlap first. But I didn't.

True story: my sister and I came out of totally different aisles of the store with the exact same feather thing in our hands. Hers was black. She said "I love this but I would like it more in red."

Mine was red.

World... meet Fang

Violet's teacher is having a Valentine box decorating contest and told them to go nuts.

I guess he's not totally nuts. He could have had moving parts or said things like "feed me candy!" But he did involve sewing.

And that's something.

Sicky sicky sick

Smitty McSickly is ill. He has some sort of RSV-like virus with a really long and ominous-sounding name that I can't remember. Basically he has a nasty cold and is too little to blow his nose so he is all stuffy and boogery and congested-in-his-chest-ery. Food tastes icky to him, sleeping in his lonely crib is not nice and people keep suctioning his nose and testing his blood O2 and touching and poking and pestering him when he just wants mom-snuggles, thank you. I keep telling him we're trying to keep him out of the hospital. He says to leave the dinosaur socks ON and stop pinching his pudgy feet.

Also today he crawled into the laundry room, industriously dug around in a basket until he found a particular sock, clutched it to his chest and said "oooooohDOboh!" He hugged it a minute more before crawling off, special sock in hand.

I have no idea.

Today's checkup involved too much of the poking and listening and pestering. Now he has two angry-looking infected ears and the doctor suggested 3 days of antibiotic injections and I just couldn't do it. We'll try the liquid.

You've definitely had too much of the doctor's office when sleeping in your sibling's trash-pile room is the best alternative.

February decisions

Remember how February makes me go crazy? Like that one February when I up and decided that we needed to move to a different house as in right now this minute? And the time that a fist through the wall started a years-long remodel of our entire upstairs (totally worth it!) And that other February when we sold our beloved Pathfinder because there was not enough room for the carseat of the third baby that I could not possibly continue life without.

February. It's a problem.

I gave last February a pass because sweet baby Smitty had rearranged our lives pretty well on his own. My major decisions last year were scaled-down decisions.

Will baby look more snuggly in his Valentine pajama suit or his hooded sweater suit?
Should we both have a little nap in our bed, or in this delicious patch of sunshine?
Do you suppose another diet Dr. Pepper before lunch will keep him awake?

February again! Change is in the air. Joe's recently replaced the red jeep with a black one. Supposedly he'll sell the red one later. The driveway is getting crowded. Also Big Blue had some ignition problems, because he was feeling left out. Blue decided that using a key in the ignition is Lame and Common and something that Other Cars Do, and that keys were no longer for him. So instead of a boring metal ignition key, Joe fashioned one from a bit of Trex decking that he found on the ground and this little notched bit of wood is how we have to start the truck.

......yep.

But hey! Swapping one jeep and repairing one truck is boring. It's been done. It's February! Joe also decided that if the Tahoe needed to be registered and I really couldn't stop complaining about it, then it was probably time to sell it too. Normally I think I'm not a complainer. I would like to think so. And maybe if we hadn't purchased the Tahoe from criminals, maybe I would have felt like I could trust and love the car. The little things would not have bothered me. But every minute of its life, I felt like I was waiting for something to go wrong. It made me worry. The heat only worked at 3 and 4. The keyless entry worked some of the time. The tachometer worked most of the time. The speedometer came and went. The CD player only played at certain temperatures. It squeaked. It rattled. And I worried.

It sold. I watched it lumber off it its new life in Idaho without any regrets. Actually we left it in the bank parking lot where the buyer was supposed to go back for it, except he called the next day to ask where was that bank again? Because he couldn't remember. I hope he found it.

And because Joe's brother is borrowing one of our cars and another is parked at his mom's house for no particular reason, our driveway was suddenly, strangely empty.

The neighbors commented on the new look.

So today, hooray! we officially joined the Nissan team again, with Nissan #5 and Pathfinder #2. And little Violet exacted a promise from all parties to not switch any of the cars for a year at least.

Donated hair

Violet has a friend in her Primary class who is in the hospital. Her friend Natalie AND Natalie's sister Alice both have a rare immune disorder and both are having a bone-marrow transplant that will hopefully (cross fingers!) cure the condition. If you want to read more about this amazing family, you can visit their blog Fishes for Marrow Wishes.

Anyway, at church yesterday, the class had a Skype visit with Natalie. Violet was a little worried that Natalie had lost her hair from the chemo and so we had a talk about it. After a few hours, Violet came back and said that she wanted her hair cut off and donated to Locks for Love (which mostly does wigs for children who lose their hair from alopecia areata). I asked her to think about it and say a prayer about it and if she still wanted to, we would get a haircut.

Well, today she was still excited about donating her hair. Here's the last minutes of her really long, down-to-her-waist (totally-in-need-of-a-trim) hair.

10 inches of hair is a lot on a little girl!

And here's the results! Doesn't she look grown-up and stylish? She has spent the evening telling me that it's OK, I will still be able to braid her hair and do half-ups and even low piggies. Do you like how she's reassuring me?

Do you ever have a day when, in between the sibling squabbles and constant demands and threats to lock them in their room and feed them meals through a cat flap, you are treated to a part of their personality that is generous and selfless and beautiful?

This was that day.

Birthday Boy

Being a toddler is totally overrated. Do not you agree? I've spent a lot of time and effort trying to talk Smitty Baby into staying a baby.

Don't you want to stay a little snack-sized armful for a bit longer?

You don't really want those teeth, do you?

Crawling beats walking anydangday. Especially when you have a fuzzy tiger face right smack on your crawling bum.

I'm pretty sure all the cool kids are still in 6-month sizes.

Are you SURE you don't want to put some of these developmental milestones off a bit longer?

These were the most well-reasoned of my many, many arguments. I've got more!

Nothing doing, he said.

The night before his birthday, after the whole house had gone to bed, I got him back out of his crib and held his fleecy-pajamaed little self and snuffed up his not-newborn-anymore smell. And cried real tears.

And I realized that, as much as I want my baby to stay a little baby, the things he's doing now are amazing too. The pigeon-toed bulldog crawl and tiny voice saying 'momom' of 11 months is just as adorable as the scrunch-faced stretches and curled-up legs of 11 days. And we certainly get more sleep, says the rational part of my brain. Yes, says the part that's crying the tears. Only you just can't rewind the crawling to the curled-up froggy legs. You can't take 23 pounds of wiggles and make it seem like 7 pounds of helpless in your arms.

But I wish I could. Oh how I wish.


Well, my love, my own, in spite of all my advice you went ahead and turned one anyway. But we could still hold off on the walking thing. Just a wee bit longer.

Let them eat cake

Or cupcakes.

Peekaboo Barn cupcakes, to be exact. Smitty's favorite thing in the whole wide world of entertainment and Possible Party Themes is Peekaboo Barn. And Elmo. But mostly Peekaboo Barn.

Also Elmo involves waaaay to much red-dyed frosting and I am not A-OK with that.

And now, Birthday Boy Smitty will tell you how one attacks ones first birthday cupcake.

And I did receive a cupcake from my sister and I did take it for my own. Also I did wonder why I was sitting on the kitchen table.

I did poke at the cupcake. I did lick it and touch it and drop it.

And behold! I found it squishy and delightsome to taste.

And I did find that the cupcake did not end at the frosting bit but that there was a manner of cake beneath which I could crush and smoosh.

And I did wiggle and laugh and perhaps do a little dance as I pondered mine own good fortune.

Yea I did savor the cupcake. And it was good.

{fin}

Our Christmas Tree

When I was little, my mom would get a different ornament for me and my sisters every year. She usually tried to make them relate to the past year - the year I worked as a junior tour guide
at the museum, my ornament was a dinosaur with Christmas lights on him. This was a tradition I loved and wanted to pass on to my own kids. After a few years of trying to find ornaments that were 'special', I met Jodie, a lovely woman in our ward who is an amazing artist. Each December she has a get-together at her home where she teaches you to sculpt things from polymer clay. People do nativity scenes and ornaments and all kinds of things. So each year I make a special ornament for each of my children. Some are holiday-themed (angels and snowmen) and some are specific to each child (Dash is totally into zombies this year so he got a zombie elf). Violet has even started making some of her own (the red-gowned lady and the snowman with broomstick arms are hers).







So this is our tree. It is small and kind of sparsly-branched, but it will never crush any climby babies who try to scale its modest heights. It will never stand as a model of amazing decoration and design, but so far no one has been able to harm themselves with any of the ornaments. The kids are proud of their creations and baby Smitty loves to re-decorate his lower half of the tree every day.